Why I am not a Satanist

Of all the subcultures to emerge following the dominance of rock over popular music, heavy metal and its associated genres remain unique in that they have maintained a counter-culture that targets not just the visible "establishment," but also all things that hold the core values of that philosophical system; metal is a naturalistic movement opposed to the utilitarian values of modern society, but it has kept its head up and thus far mostly avoided assimilation by not taking an explicitly political stance, but an artistic and metaphorical one.

This outlook has increasing driven it out of the mainstream consciousness, which has allowed it to keep its independence in part by mostly separating itself from the crowd of hopeless people looking for an identity and an easy, one-size-fits-all solution to they subliminal angst they feel about living in a fatalistic and submissive era. Of course, it has not managed this exclusively; some of the biggest sheep, and most profound losers, of our time have been metalheads, even some who have been very influential in the genre. In this way, within the metal genre the drama of the larger society is acted out in microcosm: the few who understand pulling away from the mass which wants what they have, and would emulate it to the point of drowning out legitimate voices in the genre.

What makes the mass destructive is the nature of a crowd, by definition: it is people who come together on the basest pretense and, out of fear for their individual selves, enacts a mass-will upon society at large to remove anything that threatens the herd. When you see a crowd, you are not seeing uniform people, but vastly different people who are disorganized and thus can only accept the lowest common denominator motivation, which is usually as follows: do not criticize me for anything that I do, insofar as I do not violate this basic tenet of crowd-belief toward others; give to me everything that our best people have, as I am participating in the crowd and thus "contributing." As with all utilitarian systems, this mentality punishes the more capable in order to keep the broader masses from feeling inferior, or that they're missing out.

Heavy metal music, by its very nature and alienation, recognizes that society operates on two levels: a public level, which comprises the kind of things you'd tell a crowd to make them feel you have their best interests at heart, and a private level, at which actual motivations are acted upon using the tokens of the public level in such a way that their function does not match their definition. It is a lot like hacking, actually; you overload some kind of input buffer with data that appears to be harmless, but contains concealed instructions that the machine, unaware that something labeled "data" might be "code," executes and hands control to the intruder. William S. Burroughs famously declared, "Language is a virus," and thus explained the same concept as applies to modern mass-media psychology.

What happens in a computer is that it confuses appearance with reality; the code is reality, but the idea that it is harmless data is the appearance. Similarly in our society we are divided between appearance, which generally consists of happy nonsense to keep you distracted, and reality, which is the relentless pursuit of wealth and a spiritual emptiness that justifies it. (As mentioned here before, this takes us back to a split that the Greeks noticed, between things as they are and their abstractions, which are often mentioned as that which casts a shadow, with the shadow we see being what we know of "reality.")

Since any tokens manipulated on the public level have dual meaning, and are thus meaningless, heavy metal targetted something more sublime: emotions and self-image. The Gothic, Romanticist, naturalistic and elitist-individualist imagery of even Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin did this, but it flowered from there into a proliferation of forms, each of which took the basic concept and developed it further, all without explicitly knowing why or what was being done. This ignorance of an articulation of what is being done allowed it to be passed, from mind to mind, through the subconscious channel of appealing imagery and concept in personal life, much as it was done in Romanticist literature, art and music: those who found greatness in the past, specifically medieval and ancient civilizations, and could process a melancholy acceptance of death and desire for personal greatness in heroic accomplishment, would naturally find the music appealing.

This is in part because, in addition to imagery, metal music literally sounds like the description of Romantic ideals above. It doesn't embrace the centralized harmonic structures of rock music, which is Indo-European folk music simplified to the degree of fixing a harmonic center and manipulating major/minor changes for mood, over a syncopated beat so that even the dumbest person can follow it, and it doesn't embrace the pleasing sounds and casual human vocal noises of pop. Where pop attempts to define beauty and approximate it as a medium, metal attempts to find what is beautiful in that which is, on the level of things that explicitly defined, ugly. If society exists on a level where public discourse is manipulated by private reality, metal is an inversion of that, such that the meaning of public discourse is found within private reality.

Metaphorically, metal almost exactly mirrors Romanticist literature, even down to its fascination with nature and the occult. Loneliness and alienation create independence; obsession with the forces of nature and the power of warfare creates a post-moralistic sense of seeing how life works rather than judging it; wandering into the embrace of Satan affirms the pagan belief that there can be no public level of "good" separated from "bad," but that good and bad are forces which together create a meta-good, mainly the ongoing process of life itself. These are the values of metal, and they are almost never explicitly spelled out because to do so, in the music, would be to expose the inner workings of the subculture to manipulation by those who have not discovered this meaning on their own; emulation and cheapening would follow.

For this reason, it is important to remember that Satanism in metal is metaphor. Many of the largest proponents of Satanic imagery in metal were Deists and some were Christians, but used Satan in a way similar to that of John Milton or William Blake to describe the individual Will or Ego; when Black Sabbath wrote "War Pigs," and described how modern society sends its workers off to die in foreign fields for abstract and mostly irrelevant political objectives masking a private reality of profit and power, they concluded it with "Satan laughing spreads his wings" not to praise Satan but to describe, in theological metaphor, what had occurred: humans had confused public reality with absolute truth, and thus been manipulated, and from that, an inner resentment and fatalism expressed itself in the confusion that followed. Satan laughing spreads his wings: a statement of the futility of our time, and in later bands, of the uselessness of religions that conflate Absolute truth with the public level of reality.

In doing this, metal attacked the fundamental Platonic split between the world of appearance and the world of structure; appearance was seen to be aesthetic, and not necessarily related to structure, which was defined by context, something which theological and occult imagery, by the nature of its cosmological outlook, expresses succinctly. While hardcore punk musicians attempted to rearrange the symbols of the public imagery into a meaningful private discourse, metal brushed past and declared the public reality defunct, urging its listeners to look instead toward their inner motivations and animal feelings. However, as with all things, the surging crowd - those who by definition did not and thus could not do it the first time around - sees something it likes and apes it furiously, producing a parody of it by only understanding the level of appearance and taking that appearance as truth, something which belongs to the domain of structure alone.

For this reason, although I have never been a Satanist, I have often employed Satanic and occult imagery in my writing, much as the smarter metal bands have done. In a world ruled by a Christian or secularized Christian (liberal) concept of absolute truth as public reality, one strikes back by upholding all that cannot be ruled by such a petty device, in the process pointing out that such dualistic thought patterns are in fact a simple rhetorical device misinterpreted by the crowd and thus used for its own purposes. In contrast, the crowd embraces Satanism as a truth in itself, and tries through silly literal rituals and laughable posing to be "truer" Satanists that the others, or more "extreme," or some variation of attempting to find a devotional truth in life. It cannot be done, and therefore these bands and individuals tend to ring hollow to the thinker, and their works -- well, let us say that in the years following 1996, there have perhaps been three black metal bands of the caliber of those who occurred 1990-1996, and it is similar in their own times with other subgenres of metal.

I can extend this concept further. National Socialism is popular in some black metal circles, but that is mainly because it's easier to label oneself a National Socialist and start collecting gear and posing than it is to understand the core concept of National Socialism, which is a feudalistic ethnocultural post-moral revival of classical Indo-European culture. That relatively complex thought gets distilled down to, as Faulkner said, "a hatred of black skins" alone, and thus parodies itself. What kind of idiot believes that African genocide will solve humanity's problems? Black Sabbath were more advanced in thought with "Satan laughing spreads his wings" than all the goose-stepping fools, or those from the opposite end who make the same mistake, the leftist: they assume that by labelling themselves as egalitarian and tolerant that humanity's problems will resolve themselves on the level of public discourse. All of them are misguided, and represent waste by the roadside of a path to knowledge.

Death metal and grindcore had its own version of this comedy. Bands like Carcass and Morpheus used intricate descriptions of death and decay as a way of reminding their audience that public reality is a dream designed to deny death, and that when we realize our own mortality, we can comprehend that meaning is not found in public discourse or in liberal/conservative platitudes, but in addressing reality - yes, actual reality, including that good and bad are needed to produce meta-good - we liberate ourselves from illusion and can begin work on the real task. They were followed by unnamed and now thankfully forgotten bands who found an identity in glorifying death, bloodshed, violence, disease, perversity and disgust, all in full ignorance of the original concept. It is not surprising the music of these bands was also of a lesser nature, as their thinking was clearer on a more basic, linear level.

In my view, there is truth to be found in all of these viewpoints, if interpreted correctly. National Socialism and liberalism are not that far apart when we look at their basic motivation; both want to establish healthy cultures where people are not left to the predatory whim of speculative capital. Satan and gore both wish to affirm natural belief over that of the thing-as-named public reality. Even Christians and pagans have the same essential goal, which is to find a larger reason to have values outside the material and thus find meaning in existence. However, our time is confused, as somewhere along the path to this "great" industrial society we have lost the systems of thought that give a whole meaning to the entire process of life, instead of selecting some aspect with which to label oneself and hold up as a shield of "meaning" against death. In a confused time, only a few actually seek truth, while everyone else looks for it as they might a product on a shelf or the best fruit among the ripening burden of branches.

This article is not an attempt to discredit or assault bands who use Satan as metaphor; much like Blake, or Dante, or Eliot, or any number of artists, their quest is legitimate. It should serve, however, as an introduction to the theory of metal as an art form, and an explanation of why there are so many mediocre imitators, of "Satanist" or leftist or NSBM variety alike, and only a few leaders, and thus, a mandate for future thinkers in this genre to start with the leaders and not the followers. Metal remains under assault by both public culture and public "counter-culture" (an anti-establishment affirmation of public cultural beliefs, in trendier form) alike, and thus must keep an intellectual and artistic lead or it will be assimilated and left with Slipknot, Korn and Creed as its tombstone.

Annihilaytorr

"In contrast, the crowd embraces Satanism as a truth in itself, and tries through silly literal rituals and laughable posing to be "truer" Satanists that the others, or more "extreme," or some variation of attempting to find a devotional truth in life. It cannot be done, and therefore these bands and individuals tend to ring hollow to the thinker, and their works"

Very well written article. It makes me wonder whether this article was written at least partly out of a sense of defensiveness.Truth is truth, no matter whether it comes from the mouth of a Jew, Albanian, or Siberian muskrat. I am a Nationalist for the Aryan Volk, yet I gleaned what I could out of every source I could, whether it was the Satanic Bible, Might is Right, or the Old Testament.The Aryan Satanist recognizes that Truth , as uttered by Jews, is a lie to the Aryan. The Aryan is Satan of the Jews...look at the Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, etcetera. Throughout history, we White Volk have been the main enemy of the Jew, and rightfully so. At this point in time, the world needs Aryan Satanists in order to shove the Jew's religion right up their collective, greasy asses. We ARE the Jew's Devil, and we NEED to come across that way. Oderint dum Metuant: let them HATE, as long as they FEAR.I too am sick unto death of the ridiculous, "Modern Day" Satanist of the LaVeyan stripe. Their laughable pronouncements of how "superior" they are simply exposes how insecure they are. Most Satanists of this stripe that I have met are men that rarely have sex with a member of the opposite sex.At the same time, I happen to have gained alot from many of LaVey's writings. Instead of dealing with the book he obviously cribbed off of Aleister Crowley and Arthur Desmond, try "The Devil's Notebook" and ""Satan Speaks". But, LaVey is to be taken from just as much as the other good literary sources in the world. I'd certainly reccomend Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Hitler, Ben Klassen, Kierkegaard and Hegel before LaVey, yet I would coincidentally put LaVey's writings before either of the Biblical testaments...as educational as those Testaments ARE, for anyone with an open mind.The Aryan Satanist strikes fear in the jew and African-American, and THAT is the best way to make the Jew in particular fuck up.This works through keeping him on edge, knowing he is exposed and hunted.I also chose Aryan Satanism after a great deal of trial and error. I am the worse fear of the Jew, incarnate. I am his Satan. WHom better to be Satan to than a smelly African-American or other Mud?

I am the worse fear of the Jew, incarnate. I am his Satan. WHom better to be Satan to than a smelly African-American or other Mud?

This approach would not work for me.

My goal is to build, not destroy. I want to work on my own race and I don't give a damn about any others, although by the nature of my self-bearing I usually opt to avoid negative behavior toward others.

My goal is to build, not destroy. I want to work on my own race and I don't give a damn about any others, although by the nature of my self-bearing I usually opt to avoid negative behavior toward others.

This can be admired. But, just as the Islamists found it exigent to wage war against the masses, in order to secure more Lebensraum (as did the Nazis), I feel that White Volk must be properly attired toward engaging in what I feel is an inevitable slaughter of the Less Capable. To think of the Noble Aryan Volk's lot changing via ANYthing other than a violent revolution is unproductive pipe dreaming. We White Volk will be the Jew's Satan, regardless of religious "affiliation" pronouncements. Again,The Judaistic Satan has most often been seen as being the White Man's natural Character. AFTER our succesful Jihad, we no longer need to be bedecked in Satanic guise, for we must never again be Satan of each other (see the results of the Thirty Years and Civil Wars).

You worded your question intelligently, thus I am guessing that you don't think my statement above is very "crazy" at all, and are looking to make what are basically your own views more accessible to the public. That's something that takes alot of time, while I have more Action oriented things to do.Enough to say that history points to the the very natural occurence of violent revolution as the only real Change instigator. Think Entropy...though you most likely already DO.Anyone whom disagrees with this has some kind of ridiculous, Protestant Christian allegiance that, like all Christian egalitarianistic allegiances, has its roots in Marxist poisonings.I ask the poster that asked me to elaborate to give his own ideas on how to change the sorry predicament of White Kultur today. I personally would be VERY interested. I believe you sympathize with Us. You, being obviously bright, know as well as the Rest of us that Action is most effective from behind enemy lines, and I am betting you sense that there are already members of Us behing those lines. The Revolution will be like an implosion...can you come up with any other method more realistic...more workable in the "Real World"? I respect your opinion, but I'm betting it's awfully close to Ours, Kamerad.

are looking to make what are basically your own views more accessible to the public.

I don't really give a damn what the masses believe. You'll alienate intelligent racialists as well by screaming, "I am Satan! Kill african-americans!"

Quote

Enough to say that history points to the the very natural occurence of violent revolution as the only real Change instigator.

All revolutions I know of have furthered the dissolution of culture. Positive changes, on the other hand, are generally furthered by a "revolution from above," not some violent rebellion.

Quote

Anyone whom disagrees with this has some kind of ridiculous, Protestant Christian allegiance that, like all Christian egalitarianistic allegiances, has its roots in Marxist poisonings

Christianity predates Marxism.

Quote

I ask the poster that asked me to elaborate to give his own ideas on how to change the sorry predicament of White Kultur today.

Infinite progress is delusion. Our decadent society is destined to consume itself and we will re-emerge from the ashes. I believe Indo-Europeans should retreat to rural areas and wait for the world to die, all while raising honourable, intelligent children to lead the future.

I don't really give a damn what the masses believe. You'll alienate intelligent racialists as well by screaming, "I am Satan! Kill african-americans!"here is the ideological site of my band, not much stupid on it:recrucifier.0catch.com0 as in "zero"

All revolutions I know of have furthered the dissolution of culture. Positive changes, on the other hand, are generally furthered by a "revolution from above," not some violent rebellion.Please describe this revolution from above. I await your argument concerning your stated position that violent revolution causes dissipation, instead of positive change, for a culture. To precipitate your answer a bit (I am being a bit presumptuous, forgive please), one COULD say that Our Leader, Adolf Hitler's wars ultimately handed the Jews dominion over the world. But I must reming the poster that , in time, Hitler will be seen and admired just as have men like Caesar and Alexander the Great. The latter mentioned warrior made mistakes...at times profound ones, just as Hitler and Caesar did. Yet, people will become more and more sympathetic to Hitler's fight...Time will be the redeemer, as it always is. It may not happen in our lifetimes.

Christianity predates Marxism.

Yes, but Marx was the son of a pharisiacal Rabbi, which definitely pre-dates Protestant Christianity by nearly 2000 years, and Catholicism by about 425.

Infinite progress is delusion. Our decadent society is destined to consume itself and we will re-emerge from the ashes. I believe Indo-Europeans should retreat to rural areas and wait for the world to die, all while raising honourable, intelligent children to lead the future.

You reveal yourself as a very Noble White Man, and I admire your thinking. Your points are obviously valid. Yet there MUST be direct Action. I would be amazed to hear a coherent argument totally against that. I honestly don't think there IS one.No offense, Kamerad, but there HAS to be action, to reinforce the credibility of Our Cause. Certainly not "just" violence, there HAS to be philosophical backing, the type that harkens back to the great European thinkers of the past centuries. But that has to be COUPLED with informed Action.But perhaps you really DO have a strong argument against that. Please read some of the texts in my website carefully, and consider an extended elaboration upon the above points.

I am the worse fear of the Jew, incarnate. I am his Satan. WHom better to be Satan to than a smelly African-American or other Mud?

This approach would not work for me.

My goal is to build, not destroy. I want to work on my own race and I don't give a damn about any others, although by the nature of my self-bearing I usually opt to avoid negative behavior toward others.

This is the best view of Race, and is the view I have held for a good year or so now, after the initial "White Pride"-tinged-with-violent-racism phase of my youth.

Many people find this goal hard to understand. Then again, many people are idiots, who should, really, be shot dead, right now.

The general view of me amongst my closer acquaintances is that I'm some kind of White Supremacist. This is a view that is not dispelled by careful argument from myself against that supposition: despite the fact that people have openly accepted, in front of me, that I am evidently not an advocate of the "White Power" movement, the very same people will return another day and say "But wait, aren't you a White Supremacist or something?"

An even more distant acquaintance of mine told me that he "worshipped Satan", a while ago. When I asked him if he actually believed that a physical creature named Satan existed, he answered "No, but his power rules this world". When I asked him to elaborate, he explained that he believed Satan to be representative of the Chaotic forces of Nature, whereas God was representative of the Order of Nature, thence, as we are currently living in stagnating societies and civilisations, the need for change - a Chaotic force of Nature, by his estimation - was required. As a result, he is a "Satanist", and indluges in the related imagery, listens to the music, buys the t-shirts, and the hair gel, and the make up, and the jewelry, and the "gothic" candel holders, skull goblets, crosses, coffins, etc.

It is interesting, how someone with rather a clear view of the decadence of this society, someone who will openly profess his views against that same society, can be so horrendously in its sway. In him, the hipster "Satanism" that has become so popular meets a Philosophical "Satanism", seeking change in a dying world.

No struggle (war) is won with defense or retreat only. There has to be counter attack and advances on strategic areas.

There isn't any one demographic always at fault. When these turn into destructive collective forces, it is because they are attempting to force their fantasy aesthetics onto reality, like an odd shaped key that does not fit the lock. In history, this has pretty much happened to every settled people in the world. Perhaps Jews have been by far the most easily snared by the attractive shadows on the wall and since they tend to create a shadow key for reality's lock, they tend to be scorned a bit more than others who are not as commonly snared.

That doesn't make them or any others Sheer Evil, but it may indicate a tendency of a group to frequently lose its way in the world and slip into group unreality such that it is by far the very last demographic among mankind (e.g. Israel) to stake its territorial claim and settle. They are practically a backward anachronism among mankind as such.

I am the worse fear of the Jew, incarnate. I am his Satan. WHom better to be Satan to than a smelly African-American or other Mud?

This approach would not work for me.

My goal is to build, not destroy. I want to work on my own race and I don't give a damn about any others, although by the nature of my self-bearing I usually opt to avoid negative behavior toward others.

This is the best view of Race, and is the view I have held for a good year or so now, after the initial "White Pride"-tinged-with-violent-racism phase of my youth.

Many people find this goal hard to understand. Then again, many people are idiots, who should, really, be shot dead, right now.

The general view of me amongst my closer acquaintances is that I'm some kind of White Supremacist. This is a view that is not dispelled by careful argument from myself against that supposition: despite the fact that people have openly accepted, in front of me, that I am evidently not an advocate of the "White Power" movement, the very same people will return another day and say "But wait, aren't you a White Supremacist or something?"

Virtually all racially-aware people I know are like this - some consciously some not. But all are peaceful, in no way brimming with racially-tinged animus, and have only the best interest of themselves, their families and their people in mind - none obsess about tearing down other racial groups. (obviously many of those who populate racially-themed internet fora are sadly another story entirely, but we all know how that is)

The problem is that as DMBM phrased it, the desire to "work on my own race" and not "give a damn about any others" is in and of itself so much "racism" and "hate" according to modern orthodoxy. Thus, it's a damned if you do, damned if you don't proposition - which is something most of us here are used to anyway from our "extreme" worldviews as is. Still, don't fool yourself that caring about only your own and not bothering with "hatred" of others is any more acceptable today than being a card-carrying "neo-nazi" or what have you. It's ridiculous and wrongheaded...but what in today's thinking is not?